Max Mahle, Kristen Walter, and April Culver Photo by Scott Lasky

We will soon learn that this is Tom, our narrator, who is caught up in a web of memories, himself appearing partly real and partly a hazy image of someone not currently present but of his own imagination. As he explains, "I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion."

In 1944, Tennessee Williams skyrocketed from near obscurity to widespread fame with the premiere of The Glass Menagerie, a play touted as a memory play both in the script and in its evident connections to the playwright and his family of an excessively attention-seeking mother, a mentally and physically fragile sister, and a long-absent father. In the decades since, many revivals of the late 1930s St. Louis, middle-class setting have time and again been recreated on stages on and off Broadway, in theatrical centers worldwide, and in thousands of towns where many high-school-aged actors have cut their acting eye-teeth on the four now iconic roles in the play.

Los Altos Stage Company now joins that long list of productions with a staging that impressively accentuates the memory aspects of Williams' famous script through the otherworldly lighting design of Carsten Koester, where deep blues, greens, purples and reds dominate the otherwise dimly lit, shadowed atmosphere of the modest apartment designed with authentic feel by Seafus Chatmon. Further enhancing the dreamlike setting is the ongoing incidental period jazz and big band music created by Gary Landis–tunes that sound both vaguely familiar but still distant and unrecognizable in one's one memory bank. As the play progresses, director Landis' unique sound and lighting decisions become part of the play's dialogue and are particularly important in creating a sense that what we are seeing is in fact not totally real but recreated scenes from our narrator's memory–some of which happened and some that maybe are how he wants to remember them happening.

Tom, we will soon learn, works in a shoe warehouse for a mere $65 a month. He clearly feels obligation to support his father-less family, but at heart he is a would-be writer who also often appears near suffocating inside the walls of his family's apartment. Max Mahle convincingly portrays in often a low-key, matter-of-fact manner a Tom who seems partly real and partly a hazy image of someone not really present, often standing outside on the fire escape engulfed in deep shadows and watching with intense introspection whatever is happening inside the apartment–and thus what is brewing inside his own memory.

Tom tells us he is "dreamy," but inside he is "boiling." His memories fail to edit the moments when the tensions inside erupt into outward shouting matches with his nagging mother. Often after a verbal row, he escapes to the world of movies where he surrounds himself in newsreels, cartoons, and current features as he plots a plan for a more permanent escape to shores and cities far away from St. Louis. Max Mahle is just the right combination of being present and not present, of momentarily being engaged and then suddenly being somewhere far and distant.

Tom is animated and at the same time relaxed when he remembers being alone with his sister, Laura. Unlike her brother who grabs every chance possible to leave the apartment, Laura never wants to physically absent herself from the home's protection from a world where she feels an outsider. She suffers a limp from an earlier bout with pleurisy; even more debilitating, she is almost paralyzed by her extreme shyness.

Laura's escape mechanism is quite opposite from Tom's. She sits for much of the day in a chair next to her collection of small, crystal animals, of which a delicate unicorn is her special companion. As she attends to her family of glass pets, she listens to scratchy recordings of music from an earlier era on the vintage Victrola player.

April Culver is a plaintive, heart-breaking Laura, with frozen poses that will long remain in audience members' own memories, just as they do in Tom's. Her head is often bent downward to escape eye contact, even with her own mother, with hands so tightly fisted as to appear red and deformed, and with a tendency to hug herself while rocking back and forth as she sits on the floor. Her pale-faced Laura often looks as if she could faint or vomit at any moment. That is especially true every time her mother suggests that Laura must be ready to receive "gentleman callers"–something that has never happened even as the mother's own world of illusion hopes that today someone might come to court (and then marry) the twenty-three-year-old recluse.

At one point, Amanda confides to whomever is listening, "Both my children are unusual." She has high hopes and makes constant demands of them that are beyond what either wants or is even capable of fulfilling. Amanda exists in her own memories, of when she lived a more comfortable life as a Southern belle of sorts in Blue Mountain, Mississippi. She often recounts how she was often surrounded in her family's parlor–at least in her memory's version–by a host of handsome "gentleman callers," all wanting to secure her undivided attention. When she recalls those days, she flutters about like a butterfly, full of sighs, detailed stories, and happy but faraway smiles, fanning herself as if she were still in the sultry but seductive environment she remembers as home.

Amanda is worried about a son who seems too content with his warehouse job instead of seeking ways to advance himself. She is even more concerned by his nightly absences, and she fears he is not at the movies but in bars living the life of a drunkard. For her daughter, she imagines almost daily that this is the day a gentleman caller will finally come, prodding her timid, mostly silent Laura to remain "fresh and pretty" for that elusive visitor.

When neither child takes her suggestions for their improvements seriously, Amanda's Southern-bred charm instantly transforms into an erupting storm of outraged disappointment. Kristen Walter quickly leaves behind Amanda's singsong, Southern chitchat voice to launch into a tirade of accusations accompanied by screams, a shower of quickly manufactured tears, and a stomping exit of wails. In scene after scene, Kristen Walter finds a host of mannerisms, vocal manipulations, and facial expressions to employ as Tom recalls a mother whom he both adores and abhors.

To appease his mother's constant pleas as well as to seek her forgiveness for his own moments of fury, Tom finally agrees to grant her wish of inviting a coworker to dinner. Jim O'Connor walks innocently into the trap set by Amanda, with the apartment remodeled overnight with yesteryear's stored-away materials and dishes and a Laura forced to don a frilly, flowery dress–all orchestrated by a desperate mother hoping to lure the gentleman caller to her daughter's altar. When Laura discovers that Jim is a boy she knew in high school with whom she has ever since had a crush, she panics and limps in defeat to an awaiting couch.

Christian Vaughn-Munck confidently conveys an easygoing and genial guest who is politely amused when Amanda eagerly becomes a coquettish, flirting dinner host. With a believable charm that appears genuine and natural, his Jim finds a way to ease Laura's nerves and melt her shyness for a few minutes. Through a stick of gum, a jovial recounting of their shared time in high school, and a soft spot in his own heart for this girl whom he diagnoses without judgment as suffering from an "inferiority complex," a magical moment blossoms between them–a fleeting minute whose sweetness soon turns sour for all involved.

For anyone who is traveling their own memory lane in seeing The Glass Menagerie once again, the two-hour, fifteen-minute (plus intermission) Los Altos Stage Company production feels comfortable and familiar while failing to break much new ground. However, in that familiarity and through the cast's excellent performances and the creative team's inspired decisions, the revisit with Tennessee Williams' classic is quite fulfilling.

The Glass Menagerie runs through February 16, 2025, Los Altos Stage Company, 97 Hillview Avenue, Los Altos CA. For tickets and information, please visit losaltosstage.org, visit the box office in person Thursday and Friday, 3 - 6 p.m., or call 650-941-0551.